Tweet My colleague Eva Stringleman noticed that “halloween costumes” was the fourteenth most popular search term in the UK sending traffic to our Apparel category last week – a very high ranking in an industry dominated by brand searches. So following on from a yearly tradition set by our US counterparts, I thought it would [...]

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Tweet The amount of UK Internet traffic online retailers receive from social networks increased by 153% between December 2006 and September 2007. This September, 3.1% of UK Internet visits to the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category came from a Hitwise custom category consisting of the top 25 social networks in the UK. Online auction sites, [...]

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Tweet We’ve talked about the rugby quite a few times, and the less said about the football the better. So I’ll finish off what has become Hitwise Sport Week with Formula 1, the other great British hope this weekend. Formula 1 websites are included in our Motorsport category, which is currently experiencing the highest level [...]

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Tweet Unfortunately it seems that the polls, the party, and the public are indeed merciless, and last night Sir Menzies Campbell stood down as leader of the Liberal Democrats. Yesterday there was a seven-fold increase in traffic to the Lib Dem’s website, and it overtook both the Tories and Labour in terms of visits. Campbell’s [...]

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Tweet Following the England rugby team’s semi-final victory over France this weekend, last week there were more UK Internet searches for the term ‘rugby’ than the term ‘football’ for the first time in 2 years. There has been a six-fold increase in the number of UK Internet searches for ‘rugby’ since the World Cup started [...]

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Tweet Radiohead grabbed headlines last week by announcing that fans will be allowed to name their own price when downloading the band’s new album, In / Rainbows. The band is currently taking pre-orders via their official website, which saw an 11-fold increase in UK Internet traffic last week to become the most visited website in [...]

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Tweet Last week I was in Manchester for the excellent Manchester Digital conference. As a music fan, the city is forever linked in my mind with the Factory Records and the late Anthony H. Wilson. There have been a number of films telling the Factory story recently: first there was 24 Hour Party People staring [...]

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Tweet The Rugby World Cup has managed to knock football off the back pages a few times over the last month, particularly this weekend. Unsurprisingly, searches for ‘rugby’ have increased by 250% since the beginning of September, with specialist rugby sites and news sites benefiting most from this increase in traffic. Last year Bill did [...]

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Tweet Following a charity interlude, here is the penultimate Christmas shopping ‘hot products’ list. Analysis of the top search terms sending traffic to top 100 UK online retailers shows that the most popular girls’ toys, dolls, are 29% more popular than boys’ favourite, toy cars. The most popular doll searches are Baby Born, Bratz, Barbie [...]

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Tweet The crisis in Burma has caught the attention of the press and public alike. Searches for ‘burma’ increased 17 fold last week, with the largest proportion of traffic going to Wikipedia and the news sites. However, the fourth and fifth recipients of traffic were aid sites: Burma Campaign, specifically set up in response to [...]

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